July 24, 2012

However, we don't live in Turkey, Russia, China, Cambodia, Guatemala, or Uganda; we live in the United States of America where none of these things has ever happened (except to the American Indians), but where all kinds of mass murders have taken place by people who misuse firearms and explosives.

Don't mistake what I am saying because I have owned a gun since I was a teen-ager and walked alone, without even my parents’ knowledge, into my hometown hardware store to purchase a Mossberg .22 which I used in competition as a member of the National Rifle Association and of my high school rifle team. Times change. There is nothing wrong with reasonable gun CONTROL, which the government of the Ameriican British colonies has been doing for nearly 400 years. This is history, and anyone can verify it by recourse to the Internet:

On 22 March of 1631 the colonial government of Massachusetts Bay enacted the first military legislation in North America requiring that all adult males (except ministers and magistrates) had to own arms and therefore constituted the militia which could be called upon in any emergency to defend the towns and villages of the colony (http://www.history.army.mil/reference/mamil/MAMIL.HTM).

(The requirement that all able-bodied males needed to own a gun was in effect a form of taxation, which raises a different question about “Obamacare” and a recent Supreme Court decision, but I digress).

NOTA BENE: Adult male citizens of Massachusetts Bay Colony were required by the government to purchase their own firearms if they could afford them; those arms had to be registered with the government so that, for one thing, the government during emergency situations could confiscate the arms of infirm or elderly owners of guns who could not serve in the militia, and those arms would then be furnished to able-bodied but non-gun-owning members of the militia. Otherwise, towns were required to furnish arms to adult males who couldn’t afford them and later collect the costs of those arms through taxation, which was called “raising a rate.”

I don’t know what the context of Senator Feinstein’s remark was, but it is no doubt true that “Criminals prefer unarmed victims, and dictators prefer unarmed citizens.” One might add, “But movie audiences prefer armed crazies to be on-screen only.” It has been the American government's duty since 1631 to regulate firearms.

July 09, 2012

The troll governor of Maine, Paul LePage, has called the Internal Revenue Service of the United States of America “the new Gestapo.” LePage was born on October 9, 1948, three years after the end of World War II. I was born fourteen years earlier, so I actually remember that the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany, committed unspeakable atrocities against human beings under the monster Adolf Hitler, and that its leaders after the war were tried and convicted of war crimes.

“Governor” LePage apparently blames the I. R. S. for causing passage of what he and his fellow neo-Fascists (if he can do it, others may as well) call “Obamacare,” the health bill that was originally formulated by the presumptive Republican candidate for President Mitt Romney when he was himself a governor…of Massachusetts, subsequently passed by the Massachusetts legislature and later by the United States Congress, and declared constitutional this year by a majority of the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative Republican who was the swing vote. How the I. R. S. had any hand at all in this is beyond my limited imagination to apprehend.

LePage is a minority governor, having been elected by one-third of Maine’s voters because the Democrats and Independents split their vote between two other candidates. He has no mandate to govern, and Maine’s laws need to be revised so that the person who is elected to lead the state has at least a simple majority. Yet LePage thinks that he can ride roughshod over a majority of the citizens of his state just as Governor Scott Walker does over the people of Wisconsin — the difference being, of course, that Walker actually won his election and survived a recall election as well. LePage, like Walker, hates government employees and would fire them all if he could, but in fact he hates all laborers, going so far as to remove unilaterally a pro-labor mural from the Maine state Department of Labor!

According to Wikipedia, “LePage was born in Lewiston, Maine, the eldest son of eighteen children of Theresa B. (née Gagnon) and Gerard A. LePage, both of whom were of French-Canadian descent. He grew up speaking French in an impoverished home with an abusive father who was a mill worker[!] His father drank heavily and terrorized the children; and his mother, though a loving parent, was too intimidated to stop him [the population of Maine a mother surrogate figure to be punished for its inaction?]. At age eleven, after his father beat him and broke his nose, he ran away from home and lived on the streets…seeking shelter wherever he could find it, including in horse stables and at a ‘strip joint.’ After spending roughly two years homeless, he began to earn a living shining shoes, washing dishes at a café and hauling boxes for a truck driver. He later worked at a rubber company, a meat-packing plant, and was a short order cook and bartender.”

How does a man with this background have so little empathy with labor and laborers? Does he think he “made it” all on his own? Does he blame society for what his father did to him? Here’s a question I’d truly like to be answered: Does he show any of the same traits as his drunken and abusive father? The only thing that would run against such a theory is the fact that he is as much opposed to domestic violence as he is to the citizenry he is supposed to serve, including minorities. Give him one point for the former. Take away all the rest for being a disgrace to his state, the nation, and to humankind. Yet I have a gift for him, an epitaph:

R.I.P. GOVERNOR PAUL LEPAGE OF MAINE

The minority executive who on Martin Luther King’s Birthday said, the N.A.A.C.P. can “kiss my butt”

The Virginia Quarterly Review"The Mutable Past," a memoir collected in FANTASEERS, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Lewis Turco of growing up in the 1950s in Meriden, Connecticut, (Scotsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2005).

The Tower JournalTwo short stories, "The Demon in the Tree" and "The Substitute Wife," in the spring 2009 issue of Tower Journal.

The Tower JournalMemoir, “Pookah, The Greatest Cat in the History of the World,” Spring-Summer 2010.

The Michigan Quarterly ReviewThis is the first terzanelle ever published, in "The Michigan Quarterly Review" in 1965. It has been gathered in THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LEWIS TURCO/WESLI COURT, 1953-2004 (www.StarCloudPress.com).

The Gawain PoetAn essay on the putative medieval author of "Gawain and the Green Knight" in the summer 2010 issue of Per Contra.